Last week I spent over 40 hours in a small room with the same 18 people. As the instructors pointed out, you would think that that would mean we would all hate one another by the end of the week. On the other hand, I hadn’t ever met 13 of them outside of a professional context before, which means that this Social Responsibilities of Researchers boot camp was the quickest way to learn how to meet and tolerate and become incredibly comfortable with a relatively large group of people in the shortest amount of time possible. While I was going to write a blog post solely reflecting on this boot camp experience, I thought it might be more worthwhile to expand out to reflections on my first year (or 9 months, I guess) of graduate school.
I started this by writing out a long winded sad-sack post about how terrible that first few months of grad school was – the ones were I felt like I was in a free float, both in terms of not having a network of friends and of not having anything concrete (like wet lab work) to research. Instead, I think this is best structured as a handy table of do and do nots.
| DO NOT | DO |
| Skip out on orientation events, even if it’s raining | Really, just fucking bring an umbrella, I know you hate humidity but there will probably be cookies. |
| Hide while your roommate is having a dinner party | Go to happy hours and meet said roommate’s friend network and steal them for your own |
| Compare yourself to the other first year graduate students, they are both in wet labs and doing rotations so stop freaking out that you just funneled poop and read papers for the entire semester | Enjoy Duke despite the literal mountain of shit you have to process. Keep working on whatever you can find obsessively (looking at you, GRFP). |
| Sign up for literally all the talks | Just kidding, you should totally do that. Free snacks and facial recognition by the heads of the professional development departments. |
| Try to keep track of all your commitments on random loose bits of paper and iPhone notes | Use an electronic calendar – set up events in a series |
| Put up with racist bullshit microaggressions | Chug that hard cider and tell that drunk idiot where he can shove his justifications for colonialism |
| Avoid getting involved in social event planning | Plan that Halloween party and also come up with an awesome award winning group costume |
| Have the same amount of Jell-O shots as someone who is literally twice your size (verified) | Aim for the window/toilet/trash can. Sleep on tile floor for easy clean up. |
| Freak out that someone in your group is useless | Just do the work, those people always exist and are also doing grad school all wrong. |
| Worry about grades | Do the work, learn the material – there isn’t a curve anymore. This is grad school, where the classes are made up and the grades don’t matter. |
| Sign up for literally all the outreach | Just kidding, you’ll sleep when you graduate. Go tell those children about biomes right meow! |
| Freak out about being wrong | Let the shame roll off your back and learn from it. |
| Freak out about your project being in constant flux | PIs are like cats – you will never know what they’re thinking or why they seem to cause chaos at regular intervals |
| Only stick to meeting people in your department | Sign up for things that let you interact with less poop obsessed people. |
| Get too flustered by next week’s commitments. | Take grad school one small garbage fire at a time. “You can stand anything for ten seconds, and then another ten seconds, and then another…” |
| Take for granted how much you do actually know | Try to explain your project to anyone unfamiliar with your specific field and realize just how much background and jargon you already have. |
In summary, my first year was like a garbage fire that keeps flaring up whenever you thought it was under control. Stop panicking, back up, and roast marshmallows.